America’s transportation marketplace is amazing, but the US supply chain showed some vulnerabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, vulnerabilities that our adversaries saw clearly.
America’s supply chain must become more durable and resilient to protect national security. The COVID-19 pandemic shut down supply chains, and they’re still not normalized.
Beneath the supply chain problems that large US manufacturers and retailers felt in 2021 were 300,000-plus motor carriers and brokers with millions of committed lanes, firmly intact in early 2020. Those lanes and volumes changed or disappeared in March 2020.
Scrambling for their lives, providers found customers to replace lost business. Carrier networks changed overnight. By summer 2020, those dark or slow manufacturers tried to step up but ran into supply issues, labor issues, and, of course, trucking issues.
Since then, shippers have spent months luring capacity away from each other, continuing those network changes; the churning adds mind-blowing complexity as the industry tries to understand what the issue is. There is no one issue. There are infinite issues and ripples, as the world’s economy has yet to fully reopen.
More recently, everyday Americans were exposed to the phrase “supply chain.” Even President Biden has been talking about the supply chain. What many Americans don’t understand, and what government needs to help to shape, is that so many of our goods are reliant upon imports from China.
China is the world’s no. 2 economy and America’s no. 1 military adversary. When major US ports had dozens of ships awaiting unloading, with many consumer products short or out of stock, it became apparent how reliant the country is on Chinese-produced goods.
A stoppage of key, lifesaving products like pharmaceuticals, personal protective equipment (PPE), or other materials and parts could potentially cripple the country and the economy. US businesses must diversify their supply chains, build resilience and redundancy, and bring at least some manufacturing closer to the US, or risk losing a conflict without a shot being fired.